Blizzard may be newbies when it comes to first person shooters, but they definitely know what the PC gaming market wants. And two things they definitely want in an FPS are dedicated servers and custom matches.

In a recent interview with Kotaku, game director Jeff Kaplan and principal game designer Geoff Goodman confirmed that the game will have dedicated servers.

Kaplan said, “Overwatch will run completely on Blizzard servers. With that said, and when we do matchmaking it will be in a Blizzard pool, we are looking at regions and IPs and doing the best to minimise any sort of ping issues.”

He then went on to add that “we definitely are going to have a custom game option.”

“We’ll allow you to set up some of those things that traditional dedicated servers allow you to do. Basically give you a safe place to go play a match to play with your friends and not go into the big matchmaking pool, we’ll have a setup that will allow for that as well.”

This does mean one thing, of course. Since the game will be within the warming comfort blanket of Battle.net, that means no LAN play. Not exactly surprising, but a little disappointing.

Kaplan also confirmed, unsurprisingly, that Overwatch will also feature a spectator mode, and there will be a rudimentary version of that when the beta launches. Not exactly shocking, given Blizzard’s recent trend of trying to turn all of their games into an eSport.

Overwatch probably has the best chance out of the new games Blizzard are trying to turn into a competitive eSport, but the FPS side of eSports is fairly crowded. Not only that, but Overwatch will have to face off against the grand daddy – Counter Strike: Global Offensive.

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